Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/336

314 in which the doings of men have, as befits a totemic people, been transmuted by the mythic fancy into the doings of birds and fishes.

It is rarely that one meets with a narrative concerning social origins of which the mythical character is so obvious. More generally the narratives of rude peoples which deal with social topics are of the kind often known as culture-myths or sagas. Such myths or sagas give an account of the introduction of various elements of the culture of the people who narrate them, but, in general, it is the introduction of material objects and of magical or religious rites which are especially recorded in these narratives. It is only exceptionally that there is any explicit reference to the introduction of social institutions.

Having now defined my terms and the scope of the subject with which I propose to deal, I can turn to the special business of this paper, the attempt to discover a general principle which may guide us in the attempt to assign their proper value to myths as evidence of the history of social institutions. For this purpose it is necessary briefly to survey the whole field of mythology to see whether any definite proposition can be laid down concerning the objects which are especially prone to become the subject of the mythopoeic tendency.

The principle I venture to suggest is that it is not the especially familiar and uniform which becomes the subject of myth; that which is ever with us in the same form does not excite the mythic fancy, but for this purpose there is necessary such an element of variety and of apparent, if not real, inconstancy as will attract attention and arouse curiosity.

Let us now survey different fields of nature admittedly the subject of myth, and see how far this proposition can be justified. I will begin with myths having animals as